Mo Morsi: Compiling / Playing NetHack 3.6.0 on Fedora

The following are the simplest instructions required to compile NetHack 3.6.0 for Fedora 25.

Why might you want to compile NetHack from source, instead of simply installing the package (sudo dnf install nethack)? For many reasons. Applying patches for custom game mechanics. Running an alternate frontend. And more!

While the official Linux instructions are complete, they are pretty involved and must be followed exactly for things to work. To give the dev team credit, they’ve been supporting a plethora of platforms and environments for 20+ years (and the number is still increasing). While a consolidated guide was written for compiling NetHack from scratch on Ubuntu/Debian but nothing exists for Fedora… until now!